Rainer Maria Rilke and Solitude

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
is a paragon of solitude on three different levels. His personal
interest in solitude as a safeguard of creativity is evident throughout
his life and is specifically referenced in his writings, including his
correspondence. More intensive creativity itself led to greater
solitude, Rilke realized, as in his description of his early mentor,
the sculptor Auguste Rodin:

Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it
arrived, made him perhaps more solitary.

Solitude for creativity evoked an old conflict Rilke describes
succinctly in a poem: "For somewhere reigns an old hostility /
between living one's Life and doing one's Work." The poet was
attentive to this conflict even in mundane circumstances, as when he wrote to
a friend concerning a new flat he was about to rent:

The only question is whether I will manage to keep out all
intrusions and stay as quiet and undiscovered as I have been
accustomed to being elsewhere.

At the same time, Rilke's personal life was that of a
loner, wanderer, and social misfit, one who could not
establish close personal relationships despite a wide circle of
well-born and cultured acquaintances and admirers throughout Europe.
This central characteristic of his life prompted Sigmund Freud to
remark (in characteristically acerbic fashion) that Rilke was a "great
poet but rather helpless in life."

A third dimension to solitude in Rilke overwhelms these personal
and anecdotal aspects, namely the role of solitude in his poetry.
Perhaps a person's solitude cannot be disengaged from a particular sensibility
about society, the world and a philosophy of life. In the poetry of
Rilke, the complex layers of such views are intertwined and
highlighted by a brooding and omnipresent solitude.

Rather than follow closely the details of Rilke's life with the
chronology of his poetry and writings, it will suffice to point to
certain highlights while pursuing the theme of solitude in the
evolution of his poetic genius.

Rilke was raised by an aloof father of modest clerical skills and
an overbearing, ambitious, and well-born mother whose personality
overwhelmed the only child. Rilke was educated in a rigorous
military school, during years he described as "one long terrifying
damnation." He had few friendships and spent his years tramping
Europe from Austria and Germany to France, Italy, and Switzerland,
haunting the accommodations made for him by willing acquaintances or
renting congenial and threadbare living quarters. Rilke married once but ultimately lived alone because he
failed to comprehend his own needs and those of his spouse.

Early Poems and Letters

The Book of Hours (1905) represents Rilke's first
significant collection of poetry, a modest work projecting a
disappointed religious faith, idealizing the stark Christianity of
Russia in images of poverty and simplicity contrasted with European
decadence. Rilke's pain is here still externalized.

During this period Rilke wrestles with the boundaries of an
artist's social responsibilities, which is the core of the
solitary's dilemma as well. Though written very late in his life,
this passage is reflective of this dilemma and his thoughts even at
this early stage:

A human compassion, a sense of brotherliness, is certainly not
alien to me. ... But what completely distinguishes such a joyous and
natural sympathy from the social impulse as we understand it today
is my complete lack of any desire, in fact my reluctance, to change
or "better" as they say, the situation of anyone at all. The
situation of no one in the world is such that it [i.e., the
situation] might not be of singular benefit to his soul.

Even in later years, as a decided pacifist with antipathy toward
the ruling class of Europe, Rilke nevertheless consorted with its
wealthier and privileged representatives who, after all, appreciated
the arts. This was the dilemma of the artist and creative
personality, and always has been: does compromise with the world for
art's sake amount to hypocrisy? Eventually, the arts become the
creative solitary's path.

But early on Rilke was also trying to define solitude in the context of
sheer creativity. In Letters to a Young Poet, he advises his
correspondent to cultivate his muse by eschewing literary critics
and excessive self-criticism, instead advising him to connect to
the natural world and to freely plumb the self. To Rilke, a large component of
self was childhood and memory. By this means, he wrote,

Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live
in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the
distance.

When his young correspondent expresses concern about resolving philosophical
questions, Rilke artfully distinguishes them from art and life:

Try to love the questions themselves. ... Live the questions now. Perhaps,
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing,
live your way into the answer. ...

But everything that may someday be possible for many people, the solitary can
now, already, prepare and build with his own hands, which make fewer mistakes.
Therefore, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.

The transition from the solitude necessary for creative work to solitude as a
virtue and form of living, is clearly emerging in the central letters of this period.

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
To walk inside of yourself and meet no one for hours -- that is what you must
be able to attain.

Rilke suggests that the simplicity of the child at play, oblivious to the
busy and senseless goings-on of the adults, is the state of solitude he
recommends. For the activities of the world are contrived and lifeless, while
the spontaneity of the child's world is a "wise non-understanding." This view is
not defensive, not scornful, yet freed of "conventions, prejudices, and false
ideas." Thus for the solitary looking out into the world, "all situations drop
from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life."

Rilke's solitude goes further:

If there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to
Things. Things will not abandon you. The nights are still there, and the winds
that move through the trees and across many lands. Everything in the world of
Things and animals is filled with being, of which you are part.

About this time Rilke wrote candidly to a woman acquaintance (with an eye to
everyone he knew):

I beg all those who love me to love my solitude too, for otherwise I would
have to conceal myself even from their eyes and hands, like a wild animal
hiding from enemies bent on its capture.

With The Book of Images or Pictures (1906) , Rilke presents the
philosophical framework characterizing all future work, not so much a style as a
voice, leaving behind the dreamy symbolist for the spiritual quest that will
haunt Rilke his entire life, the theme of failed transformation and
transcendence. And there we discover the many images and evocations of solitude.

Among the images of solitude are weary angels wandering silently, of children
who know their rooms intimately, of lonely travelers and of a solitary tree
silhouetted against the sky. There are strong and moving portraits of social
alienation: a blind man, an idiot, a dwarf, a waif. Over these is the sense of
melancholy with its fractured objects, as in the poem "Lament": a dead star, a
stopped clock, a passing voice full of tears. " Everything is far and long gone
by."

Here is the portrait of "Autumn":

Whoever has no house now, will never have one,
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restless, while the dry leaves are blowing.

These are images of solitude in which the poet gropes for
meaning, to understand the irrevocable as distinct from the
involuntary. The poet's solitude is not imposed by society and
authority but is a recognition of the individual insight into the
nature of self and reality, which, however, is only the beginning of
a quest.

Among the poems of this early collection is "The Solitary." Here the poet
sees how different he is from everything else, like a sailor come from an
unknown sea, not recognizing the people he encounters. In the poem "Solitude,"
this feeling is made palpable with a grand simile:

Solitude is like the rain
rising from the sea to meet the nightfall
from the dim far distant plain ...
Solitude falls like rain in that gray doubtful hour
when the streets all turn into dawn ...
When those who are hopeless and forlorn and sorrowfully alone,
When all men, who hate each other, creep
together into a common bed for sleep
while solitude flows onwards with the rivers.

With New Poems (1907), which Rilke completes a year after The Book
of Images, comes the tactile sensibility influenced by his years as secretary for
the famed French sculpture Auguste Rodin. Where Rilke had worked as the inspired
solitary, he now wrote "not about feelings but about things felt," in what he
called Ding-Gedichte or "Thing-Poems."

In this collection Rilke offers images of panthers, swans, flowers, paintings
and statues, in which he explores his own responses, sifts them, then returns
them to the poetic muse for meaning.

Among these poems, teetering between symbolist and modern, breathing an air
of reservation and introspection, is another "The Solitary." This on
opens with
the word "No," as if responding to a suggestion or refutation denied.

No! a tower shall arise from my heart,
and I be placed atop it
where there is nothing else, not one last hurt,
nor the ineffable, where the world falls short ...

Thus the poet envisions transcending suffering, in a place where there is

nothing beyond
that will darken, then grow light again,
not even one last yearning face
banished in the not-to-be-silent night ...

not even an uttermost stone face
yielding up the center of its weight.
The distance that annihilate it
will bring to it a more blessed fate.

This blessed fate seems a bleak annihilation of self, but compare this to
the mystical sense of "The Buddha in Glory." Here Rilke contemplates a (now-lost) statue of the
Buddha in Rodin's garden, and gropes his way toward an understanding of
emptiness in the fate of human consciousness, clearly inspired by Buddhism:

center of all centers, core of cores,
almond, self-enclosed, growing sweet --
all the universe, to the farthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit ...

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich thick nectars rise and flow.
Illuminating your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
Glowing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

Later Work

Years passed, all of interest to the scholar of Rilke but which must here be
hurried past in order to explore the grand vision of the Duino Elegies.
This set of ten poems was
begun in the solitude of the castle Duino in Italy overlooking the Adriatic Sea, and
completed a decade later in another castle, that of Muzot in Switzerland. All of
Rilke's poetry, his dabbling in fiction, his essays, all the wanderings
and introspection, culminate in the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets
to Orpheus.

The premise of the Duino Elegies had been foreshadowed in Rilke's earlier
concern about the aloneness of human beings in a god-forsaken universe, where
memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a
realization of solitude. The earlier elegies evoke the presence of angels as
surrogates for the absence of God, as the opening lines of the first elegy ring
out in both fear and resignation:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even in one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Rilke evokes the Old Testament version of the angel as terrifying (Gabriel Rossetti's
painting, "The Annunciation"), versus the benign
pagan version of angel as nature spirit. Rilke's sentiment is closer to that of an
orthodox reactant to mainstream Christianity, as in Kierkegaard or even Nietzsche,
anticipating existentialism.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
Of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.

Our aloneness in the universe is not assuaged by memory or imagination or
love (as his own experience confirmed to him). Rilke's preoccupation is death, which
absorbs all. He uses images of death as varied as perfume growing faint, of
fading facial expressions, of evaporating dew, migrating birds, physical love,
the end of childhood, "steam from a dish of hot food." So then do the angels
manage to absorb our temporary radiance.

Even by the fifth elegy, Rilke has returned to the image of angels, now more like
the pagan gods, mortal and solitary: "Who are they, these wanderers, even more
transient than ourselves ...?"

The alienating sense of solitude in life is due to our desire and will to
live, to our refusing to understand or at least acknowledge our end. Unlike the trees
that stop blossoming when winter comes, "we still linger, alas, / we, whose
pride is in blossoming."

To Rilke, the child who dies young or the creative artist
become the fulfilled angel. Such was the theme of his 1909 poem "Requiem for a Friend"
written for a deceased painter-friend Paul Modersohn-Becker. The child who dies
is the young
girl Vera Knoop, the daughter of an acquaintance, who is the Eurydice of his
Sonnets to Orpheus. She is the idealized child, whose image might have been beautifully
evoked by Maurice Ravel's musical work "Pavane pour une infante défunte"
or "Pavane for a Dead Princess" composed in 1899.

Rilke also evokes the image of the hero who dies young: "The hero is
strangely close to those who died young. / Permanence does not concern him."

The hero "lives in continual ascent," Rilke writes, moving far beyond the
mundane realm of the rest of us. Yet who is the hero but ourselves, ever in our
mother's womb or in the womb of being, from which all things emerge as if from a
great cosmic labor, as if from the fruit of love. Rilke is preoccupied by the
origins and expression of love -- and the mystery of its evanescence.

As already suggested, Rilke failed to find loving relationships that would endure,
beginning with his own parents and with the women charmed by his wit and
literary gifts but from whom he disengaged for fear of their demands. Hence his
marriage failed, as mentioned earlier, within a few years. Rilke's wife was a
painter, and Rilke thought of marriage as a collaboration, not a sacrifice.

In Letters to a Young Poet, he thought of lovers not as a union but as "two
solitudes [that] protect and border and greet each other," asserting that "all
partnerships can only survive as the shoring up of two adjacent solitudes," with
each partner a solitude "that wants to move out of itself." Rilke yearned for
love's success but maintained an autonomy and impermeability that undermined all
of his relationships, or, at any rate, held them at a certain emotional distance.
For their part, his friends and acquaintances came to tolerate and understand
him. His plea in an early letters had set the tenor of his character and
relations (quoted above):

I beg all those who love me to love my solitude too, for otherwise I would
have to conceal myself even from their eyes and hands, like a wild animal
hiding from enemies bent on its capture.

The Duino Elegies is a search for transcendence, for the transformation of
pain. It is a plaintive but vain cry for a transcendent love. Rilke knows that love
is external and must be internalized, but love cannot, neither for the
solitary poet nor for anyone, ultimately. For nothing survives "Fate the
annihilator, in the midst of Not-Knowing-Whither."

Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life
passes in transformation. And the external
shrinks into less and less.

Human beings are painfully aware of their fate because they are conscious of
time and death, they are "forever taking leave," unlike the animal, which "sees
all time and itself within all time, forever healed."

But another aspect for Rilke is silence. Only the animal being always present
dispenses with "saying" while humans try to report what is "unsayable." And
ultimately, says Rilke, we belong to the earth and must love it -- not the
contrived world of society, not (to use a series of his images) to the street
jugglers and billboards and carnivals, but to the blue and yellow gentians, the
startled bird, the catkins hanging from the hazel trees, the raindrops falling
on dark earth.

The Duino Elegies were begun in Duino and completed (as mentioned
earlier) in Muzot in the last years of Rilke's life. At Muzot Rilke exemplified
solitude as creative artist but also as solitary. It became his most beloved
haunt, in keeping with what the French poet Paul Valery had said of Rilke's
days: "eternal winter long in excessive intimacy with silence."

And, indeed, silence reigned at Muzot. The old chateau was some miles from the nearest village. Here
Rilke ate sparse vegetarian meals, seeing almost no one. A passing student
called him the "hermit" of Muzot, and one commentator notes that Rilke "had
turned into a hermit and was becoming [as self-described in a letter] 'infinitely immovable, a prisoner of myself in my ancient tower.'"

At Muzot Rilke had no telephone, no electricity, and no running water. There
was a well pump, a garden, a decrepit church, and an unkempt cemetery. His discrete
housekeeper understood his needs -- he called her a "phantom." Rilke lived in
the second-floor corner of the rambling chateau, with two windows magnificently
overlooking the valley. In his workroom was a heavy oak table with a small
balconied bedroom and a chapel.

At Muzot, Rilke completed Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.
A rose in his garden pricked his finger. The finger wound would not heal, and
after many months of strange maladies, Rilke consulted physicians and followed
their many prescriptions in vain. Muzot was Rilke's last home before he died in 1926 of
leukemia at the age of 51.

¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Among the many translators of Rilke's
poetry are Stephen Mitchell, whose translations include Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, New York:
Random House, 1982; New York: Vintage, 1984; Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry
and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, New York: Modern Library, 1995; and
Letters to a Young Poet, New York: Vintage, 1986, Boston: Shambhala, 1993.
Other translators of note are C. F. MacIntyre, A. Poulin, and John J. L. Mood.